


Under the Milky Way

by Trash



Category: Linkin Park
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-31
Updated: 2014-01-31
Packaged: 2018-01-10 17:15:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1162376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trash/pseuds/Trash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mike's an asshole and Chester is homesick</p>
            </blockquote>





	Under the Milky Way

When you’re a kid in Arizona, or any small town anywhere, the world around you is suffocating. And I mean, Arizona is a big place, but when you only have five dollars to your name there’s not very many places you can travel to except those you can get to on foot. And more often than not we ended up behind the library.

The library stood beside what was a power plant, but it was torn down years ago, so all that was left was a hill of grass leading down to a brick wall built all the way around nothing. Between the hill and the wall, nobody could see anybody sitting down there, so it was perfect for us.

Even now, after touring the world and meeting some amazing people, hearing some amazing stories. Even after living a way I’d never imagined I could ever live, it’s nights behind the library under the stars that I remember. I try telling Mike this, because Mike usually understands.

“If you’d rather be back in Arizona we can always take you back, Chester.”

“No, I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Well how did you mean it, huh? Because to me it sounds like you had more fun kicking it with your drug buddies than you’re having now with us.”

I just stare at him, blankly. I can’t remember when we became such different people.

“If you’d rather spend your time day-dreaming about a life you ran away from than living the life we gave you, then go ahead.”

It’s funny, what money can do to friendships, to great people. Mike used to be a nice guy.

I lay on my back by the pool of our hotel that night, staring up at the stars. It’s funny how the stars in Portugal are the same as the ones in Arizona are the same as the ones in Britain are the same as the ones in Australia. It’s funny how it’s only people that change.

I hear the door open and close, footsteps making their way across the tiled floor toward me but I don’t move. “Hello,” I say to whoever it is.

Brad lays down beside me and lets out a breath. Not a sigh, really, just nothing. Just breathing. “Hello.”

“I’m going to punch Mike in the mouth tomorrow,” I tell him, “just so you know.”

Brad shrugs. This guy, he’s Mike’s best friend. It’s hardly a secret that they’ve been more than friends in the past, too. But all he does is shrug. “If you do it’ll have been a long time coming,” he says. “Just try not to knock any teeth out.”

I don’t know why, but I tell Brad about Arizona. About the library and the stars and the friends I don’t know anymore. I tell him what I didn’t get to tell Mike before he started bitching, that one day we went there to meet up and the place was fenced off. The wall had been torn down and there were diggers and trucks. A year later and there was an old folks home there.

“That sucks,” Brad tells me and it sounds like he means it.

“Yeah it does. Or it did. Things change, you know? After that I joined Grey Daze and never saw any of those guys again.”

“If you’d just kept going there, and sitting around doing drugs and nothing, would you have found the band?”

No.

“Then it happened for a reason. Sometimes things happen to kick you in the ass and make you realise your life is going nowhere.”

I didn’t think it’d be Brad who got it.

“My dad used to make me go to temple and listen to all this crap about God,” Brad says. “At the time he was trying to get me to be a Rabbi. He said that’s what I should do with my life. That, or be an accountant. I was always meant to be a stereotype.” He laughs.

“You’d make an awesome Rabbi.”

“No I wouldn’t. That’s so not the path God had picked for me, anyway. Because not long after that accountant-Rabbi conversation I met Mike and my dad who believed in the idea of family so strongly it made me sick, he kicked me out for being gay.”

I didn’t know that.

“Yeah well it’s not something I tell people all the time,” Brad says. “I stayed with Mike and that was my life. His mom didn’t bat an eyelid when we went to prom together. Things were good. But they couldn’t always be that way, you know? Things can’t just stay one way forever. Mike went to college and met a girl, and I went to college and didn’t meet anybody. Things changed. And then Hybrid Theory happened.”

Brad sits up and looks across the still, cold water of the pool and then looks down at me. “My point is,” he says, “I can understand how one point in your life might stick with you forever even if things are better now and you can never go back to the way things were.”

“You’re talking about Mike,” I say. It isn’t a question. “You’re still hung up on Mike? But he’s an asshole.”

“And you always say your home town is a dump, yet you’re day dreaming about that.”

I nod and sit up to look Brad in the eye. For whatever reason I lean in and brush my lips against his. He doesn’t pull away, and we stay like that for a moment. When I pull back I can’t read his expression.

“What was that for?” He asks.

I shrug. “I dunno. But maybe this will be the night I day dream about from now on.”


End file.
